Ok, so I realize as much as the next person that there are few things more tedious than having to read mediocre poetry. So, to both of you, if you came here for something else, you’ll have to wait a while longer.
This is my fourth completed poem, and it took so long that I am compelled to publish it. This because I don’t think it’s going to show up in an anthology any time soon. Knowledge of the myth of Persephone (pronounced Persephonee) is a prerequisite. Oh, and it will help to look up Tantalus too. In the version I read as a child, Persephone soothed him by holding water to his mouth and gathering fruit from the trees above him.
Winter Poem
Winter is a pomegranate seed
half-eaten and discarded
despised by Persephone
changed at once from bright crimson trophy
conquered, soiled, then left abandoned
shamefully bearing its history.
Tantalus said “Here. Seed. She ate.
She will not leave us now.
We will be happy.”
as Demeter’s pretty progeny flew absolutely terrified
through corridors and corridors
of washed-out portrait memories.
This I ponder, scraping ice from my windshield
or holding bare legs over sun-scorched leather seats.
How when one hope’s commitment oppresses
the other’s extremes seem serene.
Perhaps she agreed, learning to covet her husband Hades,
and longing for shade in the depths of Summer heat
like me dreaming of frost during fitful feverish sleep.
So I look in pity every time I see a scorned seed.
I, for one, thank poor Pluto and truly love Persephone.
It was her pain that made the world gray
and only her pain that again makes it green.
-AO IV
Dear friends,
Things have been very busy lately. After a harrowing and educational trip to China I went to Seoul to lecture the new generation of TaLK (Teach and Learn in Korea) scholars. Afterwords, the Jejudonians had our own orientation, once more at the Hotel Robero in Jeju-si. I have just now returned. In the mean time production levels as far as music and writing go have been off the charts. It’s just that there’s nothing quite ready for this forum.
Incidentally I’ve been writing poetry. I’m no Auden, but it is fun. I realize I promised fiction. On the way. Until then, here’s a little number I wrote in Shanghai. True story.
Shanghaid
I woke up on a Shanghai train
to grinning eyes across the way
which looked at me as if to say
you are a surprise, and so is today.
-AO IV
Dear readers, both of you,
A certain amount of hyperbole can be good for enjoyable non-fiction. Up to this point, everything written here has been more or less true. The only possible departures have been hyperbolic in nature. That however, will end. I have been posting not just to please my tiny readership, but also to better my writing skills.
For the past six weeks I have been working on a novel. In order to improve my fiction writing I will need practice outside of a main project. Of course they say write what you know, so you can expect everything here to have at least some autobiographical element.
As for what I write about music, it won’t be fiction. Everything about Korea you can expect to be true in spirit. That is, I won’t make up traditions, culture, places, or their character. Though I may not capture the specific people exactly I will try to capture the place and time.
I also do this to free myself from preserving reputations. I can say what I want, and nobody will know who it is about. It might not be about anyone. My friends and acquaintances will be shielded, and you get to read more interesting stories. For close friends back home, just ask and you shall receive the truth. Hell, I’ve probably told you already.
I will mark some things as Fiction, others as Non-fiction. Most things will be marked as both. Incidentally I’ve been writing music over here as well, so you can expect that to be posted once I’ve recorded it to my satisfaction. Perhaps I’ll split this into multiple pages, one for fiction, one for non-fiction, and one for music. Time will tell. In any case, I hope this doesn’t turn either of you off to the writing. I think the end result will be more entertaining.
Cheers,
AO IV
It’s hard to write about Hamdeok. Hamdeok is heaven. How do you describe heaven? It was more like hell at first. I guess that’s what Korea is to me, hell become heaven.
In Shelby County, going East on interstate 40, there is an underpass just before Exit 20. The bridge above is, in my mind anyway, the outer limit of Memphis. It is from there that as adolescents Robbie Caldwell and I used to wave at cars passing underneath. We were unabsorbed in the complications of adult life. We had no cell phones and no cars. We had never kissed a girl, though we often talked about it. The children in my classes remind me of that time, a time when saying hello to strangers was the best way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Less than a mile from exit 20 sits the psychiatric hospital I worked in just after college. I arrived at 6:37 every morning and swiped my key card, waiting for the “click” that the electromagnetic locks made upon being released. These were just some of the ghosts I left behind. Past the P & H, past Memphis University School, past the Summer Ave. drive-in theater (Rocky Horror on Halloween), past Bellevue Baptist I drove. Past the translucent inhabitants of my memory. Old lives upon old lives. In Nashville I gave my Jeep to Garrett and with it the only key I still owned. There were no more locks for me to open in the U.S.A.
This was after my Southern Tour 2009 of course. I had first left Memphis on July 29th, headed to New Orleans, Louisiana for a last hurrah with old friends. Then to Mobile to see my dad, then Atlanta for my Visa, then again Memphis for a few hours. I loaded the Jeep with a backpack, suitcase, and guitar. Then it was Nashville, Paducah, Chicago, Incheon, Suwon, Seoul, Jejusi, and finally Hamdeok. I was exhausted, completely worn out. My only greeting was a hotel bed with a neon orange cross outside one small window. Disco Golgotha in the middle of nowhere.
After ten days I moved into an apartment on the second floor of Ocean Love pension. That’s when the gravy started coming.
They tell me Hamdeok was nothing five years ago. They tell me Jejudo was nothing twenty years ago. Like I said, build build build. Hamdeok has four grocery stores, one bank, three pizza places, four saunas, two resort hotels, one of the best beaches on the island, and an amusement park. Ocean Love pension is actually for weekend getaways, but some times the landlord, who calls me “Songsangnim” (teacher in Korean), takes in semi-permanent renters. On Summer and Fall evenings I played guitar on my balcony and watched the weekly batch of warriors from the mainland wander in and out of my pink, six-story building. On Monday morning everyone showered and flew back. This lead to a noticeable dearth of hot water and a slightly disheveled English teacher on the first day of the week.
Most visitors to Hamdeok are Korean, but there are the occassional Russians, Chinese, Japanese, and Westerners. One evening I heard a Korean couple fighting overhead. The woman was screaming so loudly I feared for her safety. I ran downstairs to get my landlord, urgently banging on his door. He followed me upstairs to listen. He smiled, said “couple,” and went back down. That was the first couple of many. Koreans have a higher tolerance for fighting than we do. Of course they don’t invade other countries either.
Right now Ocean Love is empty but for the landlord and me. Hamdeok, fat and boisterous with excess residents during the Summer, is now gaunt and subdued. The beaches are covered with nylon netting to prevent the sand from being blown away. The amusement park is unlit but for one hanging bulb in the corrugated steel shack wherein sleeps the caretaker. The yellow tents that line the shore have been stripped of their plastic covering. Only aluminum skeletons remain. I keep my windows shut tightly, but the wind gets through.
If you walk West from Ocean Love you will leave town and pass a Samgyetang restaurant with a small blue sailboat atop which sits a table. When Spring comes we will eat on that boat. If you continue be careful not to stay right along the shoreline. That’s not a public road, but a private street with a guard dog. On November 14th I mistook one for the other in an iPod and Wes-Anderson-soundtrack-induced haze. I saw the dog just in time to be out of the reach of his chain. I did an abrupt about face and half laughing, half hair on end, followed the public road, which leads to the Northernmost point of the island.
There was only one day left in the Son Family Vacation. Son Family, that’s what Tanner, Dahee, and I call ourselves. Every good Migook (American) needs a Korean name. Upon hearing that Tanner had one, Teho, I insisted. Dahee named me Eun-Ho. It means “Silver Lake.” Teho means “Big Tiger.” Dahee chose that one for Tanner. They are dating. Of course we needed a last name too because in Korea one is introduced last-name first. Dahee’s surname is Son. We opted to borrow it.
There were more movies to see, but one morning in line had been enough. Besides, we had been out late meeting Sasha’s brother the night befoe. Sasha was one of my best friends in Buenos Aires. She is one half Scottish, one quarter Russian, and one quarter American. Sasha is slender and pretty with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and an inquisitive face. Argentine men called her a goddess, much because of her blonde hair, which is uncommon in the land of colectivos. They’ll also say just about anything to a girl. It’s impressive really. Sorry Sasha. Sasha is now a ski bum. Incidentally, her brother teaches in Korea. He calls himself Sirius Amadori.
Siri came to meet me in front of the McDonald’s at the Kyungsung University subway stop, exit 4. We went to a loud Migook bar and yelled politely at each other over whisky while a cover band played the Kinks and Bob Marley. I was struck hard by American bar culture.
Korean bars are relatively quiet. Small parties of friends meet up for drinks and conversation, occassionally breaking the low hum with an act of restrained boisterousness. This place was an aquarium of carnivorous sea creatures in close quarters. We swam through the multi-colored crowd to a bench covered in faux crimson leather and sat down. In raw animal endeavors, genetic makeup is the primary limiting/liberating factor, determining one’s place in the struggle for prosperity. Homo sapiens have distinct advantages though. Each temporary resident of this underwatering hole had developed personal style as an added weapon. Claws and teeth were replaced with flattering clothes, witty turns of speech, practiced nonchalance, and well-timed eye contact. My shirt collar had been flipped up in the wearing and removal of the coat I bought Friday morning at the Shinsegae shopping center. When I sat down next to Siri with the whisky a girl I hadn’t talked to yet flipped it back down. She turned out to be nice, so I flipped it up again when she wasn’t looking to see what would happen. She flipped it down again. Human sexuality, in this venue anyway, is psychological warfare. It’s what Jim Stephens and Joe Cooper would call a “fuck scene.”
I wasn’t there for battle though, just to meet an old friend’s brother. When I was a child, John Morgret and I would play telephone in the neighborhood pool, going below the surface and yelling as loud as we could face to face to see if we understood what the other was saying. Here in the ocean it sounded about the same but lacking the white background of the pool walls, the three blue tile letters on the bottom (RRP for Raleigh Ridge Park, our subdivision), and the shiny oscillating ceiling of the water. These were replaced by neon Jim Beam advertisements and veneer walls. The smell of chlorine and barbecue switched out for cigarette smoke and perfume, day turned to night.
Siri left early, and I went with the nice girl and her coworkers to a noreabang (Karaoke bar). They were all nice too. I sang Oasis with friendly Brits. Then I went back to the hostel and slept on the balcony.
Our time with the Megabox had ended, so we went to the fish market. I say fish market, but district would be more appropriate. There is a central building at the waterside. The bottom floor, which is the size of a football field, is full of fish tanks. Its floor is perpetually wet, I noticed, as saltwater seeped through my shoes and socks, saying a cold hello to my toes. I have only two pairs of shoes with me. One, hiking boots. The other, Italian dress shoes I bought in Mobile for a %50 discount. The clerk was overjoyed that I bought a nice pair in hard times. A friend of Dahee’s was with us at the market, and the two of them negotiated our lunch as I snapped photographs of tank after tank of red snapper, sea cucumber, dungeoness crab, and more kinds of sea animals than I realized could be eaten. We pointed out individual fish, choosing the heartiest and healthiest looking. Ironically this superior genetic predisposition of theirs resulted in death. I suppose some fish may be smart enough, or nonchalant enough, not to get caught. A man in a yellow apron cut up our fish as we watched. A lady seated us upstairs. Another brought us a rectancular plate of still-moving octopus which we had not ordered. I grabbed a big piece, dipped it in soy sauce and wasabi, and chewed as fast and hard as I could. Then I swallowed it. A few minutes later another lady came by and took it away. It wasn’t free, just an error on the part of our server. The fish was excellent. We ate it raw.
Our final destination was the Nampodong shopping district, just across the street from the fish market. It is a busy maze of alleyways and stores of all kinds that looks and sounds like this:
Walking through Nampodong
At 5pm our plane took off from Busan. The flight was short, just under an hour. We touched down on Jejudo. Home.
After Yonggeunsa we ate samgyetang for lunch. Samgyetang is a whole chicken stuffed with rice and one ginseng root in a pot of soup. We eagerly took the chicken apart, Dahee and I helping Tanner, whose right arm was still in a cast. He had broken it in a feat of raw and powerful aggression the night we became friends. That same morning our bosses at the NIEED had introduced us and calmly ordered that we prepare two songs for a live taping of the Steve Hatherly show, one of Seoul’s English-speaking radio programs. Dunny, a TaLK scholar from Austin, was to join. A banjo trio. We had seven hours to prepare.
Banjos are about as common in Korea as real Mexican food. I think there are two on Jejudo, Tanner’s and mine. As we practiced on the stairs of the Kyung Hee University auditorium a busload of male dancers arrived. A few shyly approached us as we were going through standard bluegrass tunes, still unsure which songs we would play. The dancers were lithe and painted a paisley green, like peacocks. Soon these most inquisitive called their companions over. Before I knew it we were three Southern boys picking away on a marble staircase in South Korea surrounded by glittery, human-sized, acrobatic peacocks with shiny black hair. They were staring at us though. For once in my life, in this most unlikely of places, I was the exotic one.
There were other acts, most notably a traditional Korean ensemble. As we awaited our stage call in the green room the drummer gave Tanner a lesson. We invited him and his band out for drinks, but they declined, instead boarding a bus to Seoul for their next performance.
Steve Hatherly was still taping when we left. Attendance was mandatory for all TaLK scholars, but we snuck out the back door after completing our duties. There were a few more acts, but watching from stage left wasn’t particularly comfortable, and going into the audience was a gamble. Once we sat down we would be trapped with everyone else no matter if we enjoyed the show or not. We walked for ten minutes to the plastic lawn chairs outside of Family Mart and I listened to Tanner talk about brewing beer. Jason, Josh, and Vadim joined us after they were freed, bringing Cheryl and Su Jin with them. The lawn chairs eventually lost their luster, and we went in search of adventure. Batting cages. What happened next was Tanner’s first defining Korean moment.
Outside of every batting cage in Korean you will find two machines. One is made to gauge the strength of your kick, the other the strength of your punch. For 500 Won (about fourty-five cents) you may have your martial prowess rated on a scale of one to one thousand by a red, yellow, or brown bag attached to a lever and an LCD screen. Tanner’s right ulna can withstand a punch the magnitude of 870. After that it fractures. I did not witness Tanner the warlord in his martial debut. I did see the picture though. It was taken just as his punch had begun to swing back from the outermost point of windup. He is standing on one leg, having leaned back with his entire body to better assist in the bellicose endeavor. In the last moment he would have full use of his arm for two months Tanner is dealing a devastating uppercut, possessed by pure blood lust. That blood lust is why Dahee and I were taking his chicken apart for him. It’s not easy to switch from right to left-handed eating with chopsticks. I believe that bag and LCD screen in Suwon still soldier on.
After lunch we missed the last bus from Yonggeunsa to the Megabox, so we took a cab. Then we saw “Talentime,” a Malaysian drama about a high school talent show and the families involved. Chris told me the director was famous in Malaysia, and she passed away just after the film had been finished. It was her swan song about love, regret, and death. See it if you can. Later I watched “Break Away” and “Night and Fog.” “Mother” is also a great movie.
Saturday morning we awoke to join the rest of the weekender tourists in the two-hour ticket line at the Haeundae Megabox. Tickets had been available online for months, but for whatever reason the Busan trip wasn’t real to me until we took off. I hadn’t even booked a bed, and it was after touching down that I received the news from my good friend Jason. I had a place to sleep. June, the owner of Zen Hostel, gently scolded me upon my arrival. “Why didn’t you plan better? Beds have been booked for four months.” Friday and Saturday I slept on the balcony. It was more comfortable anyway. The dorm rooms were too hot.
Zen Hostel Balcony
We passed the time in line singing Gillian Welch and a song we made up called “Captain Awkward” to the tune of “Captain Planet.” Tanner and I get a lot of stares. Of course, we’re white, which isn’t normal. More importantly though, there seems to be a moratorium on being boisterous in certain public spaces: lines, subways, buses, airports. It’s not a social rule we honor well. Bad foreigners. Only once have I embarrassed myself. I backed into an old lady doing the moonwalk at a subway stop. She was fine. I was ashamed. It’s over now. We were joined in line by James, also from the hostel. Dahee taught us to say “easy, tiger” in Korean. It’s “sal sal heyo.” Then she drew a picture to round out the lesson. The first movies of the day were sold out, so we went to Yonggungsa temple.
Sal sal heyo
After the Korean War, South Korea was marked by oppressive rule. Capitalist dictatorships, coups d’etat, and fast-paced economic development. For this reason the bio-luminescent dictionary and cargo container highrises. Everything happened all at once. Build build build. No time for transition. No time for a Great Generation to make cookie-cutter suburbs and spawn rebellion in myopic teenagers. No time for hippies. No time for the family unit to deteriorate. There was a busy world to join. Hank past Hendrix. Hank Williams to the Backstreet Boys in one move. Democracy arrived in 1987.
There are two Koreas, one atop the other. The first is the grandmother who runs the small convenience store across from my bus stop in Hamdeok. She can no longer stand upright, but walks with her back parallel to the ground. I see her high school classmates on the way to work. Some of them pick sesame or barley by hand in the fields that line my bus route. Others carry onto the bus heavy boxes like backpacks strapped on with rope. The flower of their youth came and went during Japanese occupation and the Korean war. Perhaps their parents were working in a Hiroshima factory when we dropped the bomb. Maybe they were communists in the Jeju uprising. U.S. and South Korean soldiers worked together, at times killing of-age men indiscriminately. Sung Chan’s grandfather lived because he hid in a kimchi pot. Koreans love kimchi. So do I now. Sung Chan is a good man. I have asked him to teach with me next semester.
The second Korea is made of the hyper-mobile tourists who ride the circle bus, the one I take every day, to Manjang or Seonsan. Their first commandment is not to wear cotton. North Face, Black Yak, Bogner, or Kathmandu top to bottom, including gloves. Visors, day packs, maps, walking canes. Some times they stop at Jongdal Chodo Hakyeo to see the quaint country school or use the bathroom. Sometimes they come onto the field to take a group picture and interrupt a T-ball game. I wish they wouldn’t. Their colors are rainbow on black.
Yonggungsa
The second Korea was of course present at Yonggugnsa. So were we, tourists at a working temple. A monk chanted devotees into eternity as we checked our various recording devices and wondered whether we were crossing the line from welcome visitors to intruders. Maybe I was the only one asking that question, but I have a feeling if other people were, they probably did as I did. I stepped just ever so slightly over the line, popping my head into the main temple to snap a few shots during meditation.
Prayer Call
Prayer Call
Here people practice knowledge of the Four Noble Truths. One must escape from samsara and the chain of interdependent origins. Sensation leads to thought. Thought leads to desire. Desire leads to action. Action leads to sensation. If you quell your desires you will cease to suffer. You are simply a collection of aggregates which to you seems permanent. There is no “you” or “I,” just interconnected strings of existence which for a brief moment have come together in such a way. Even this building will one day fall and be ground to dust. It is nothing but causes and effects. If you watch long enough you will see that it does not exist any more than the flower which blooms one day and dies the next. Plato was wrong. There are no forms. Right concentration, right mindfulness, right effort, right vocation, right action, right speech, right intention, right view. Develop these things. Be mindful. Click. “I need new batteries for my camera. Hey, let’s go eat at that samgyetang place down the road. It looks great.” Yonggugnsa is beautiful. In the gift shop I bought myself a Chinese Zodiac keychain. For Jason I bought a solar-powered flashing neon Buddha keychain.
On Thursday, October 8th, I departed from my normal after-work routine of heading into Jejusi for drinks. Instead I changed clothes, strapped on the bag I had packed two days before, and boarded a plane for the Pusan International Film Festival. I was alone. Tanner and Dahee, two close friends, were set to arrive the following night.
Busan, like Seoul and much of urban Korea, is an homage to the promise of neon. Looking down a busy street is like reading a bio-luminescent dictionary with only fifty words writ top to bottom and in seven font sizes. Over and over again I am reminded, in epileptic-fit-inducing Korean, to buy something. I don’t know what. Indistinguishable highrises line up like cargo containers in a shipyard sporting names like “Meadow Ridge.” Daewoo, Hyundai, and Kia are the makes of choice for the four-cycle gas-burning inhabitants of this dry and visible land. Anything you want Busan told me as I rode the taxi over Yeongdo bridge. The promise of neon. The promise which daily pours itself out to 3.6 million inhabitants. The promise of Busan.
I had come with no plans and no expectations except to acquire a Chinese visa and see one or two films. The rest was gravy. Jejudo is beautiful and perfect in its simplicity, but I needed a breakout weekend. Of course no breakout weekend would be complete without new acquaintances.
Chris being interviewed after a screening of "Talentime."
At the hostel was Chris Bourne. Chris came armed with a press pass. He is a film critic for Meniscus magazine in New York City. Under duress Chris provided me with a “must-see” list of movies I otherwise would have known nothing about. There was also Bruce, an Aussie who told me he no longer had to work due to brain damage. Despite this handicap he manages to spend most of his time traveling the world. Bruce has a different t-shirt with his name writ in the native language of each country he travels to. He prefers Asian travel because it is cheap. Chinese visas for U.S. citizens, however, are not.
The Chinese consulate is a walled compound with two entrances. I only saw two anyway. One is a guarded set of doors for supplicants bearing cash and passports. The other is an automated wrought-iron gate for the Rolls Royce with bullet-proof windows that chauffeurs the ambassador around. I took the supplicant entrance, paying about one-hundred and fifty dollars for two admissions to a country that had lit streets and legal codes when my ancestors were covering their naked bodies with lime and screaming at Roman invaders. The Chinese had gunpowder and a Great Wall. We had the adze and bagpipes. Once we learned about the gunpowder it was all over. Hey Seamus, let’s put this in a tube and blow people to hell with it. Great idea. Here comes Western Civilization.
One story always comes to mind when I think of China. Stan Polson told me. I don’t know if its true. He said once a Chinese Emperor sent out envoys to see what the rest of the world had to offer in terms of culture and civilization. The Emperor hoped he would find people to trade ideas with, make friends. They made it as far as Africa and then they turned back. No one else had half the remembered history and sophistication the Chinese had. “They came back and told the Emperor the world was shit. There’s no need to look outside of China” That’s what Stan said. It makes me laugh.
Meerkats await their prey.
No amount of civilization will change some things. Friday night I waited, tickets in hand, outside of the Haeundae Megabox theater, for Tanner and Dahee to arrive. It was the second night of the festival. Movie stars arrived every fifteen minutes or so. As they exited their limos and vans, they were greeted by a screaming throng of high school girls. I think in ancient times, mobs of teenage girls must’ve shaken and cried at returning warlords. It can’t have started with the Beatles. Just doesn’t add up. The girls were like a meerkat colony. A few waited outside, alert, heads up. The rest congregated inside in the foyer of the mall which houses the Megabox. There is a wall surrounding the elevators. It is all mirrors, and the girls took advantage of those mirrors to painstakingly apply makeup and style their hair. When the meerkats outside sounded the alarm, the entire colony went for the emotional food source.
Attack!
Surrounded by bodyguards, celebrities navigated the howls, bouquets, camera flashes, and tears. When they finally made the elevators, inconsolable girls wept in the aftermath, gasping for air. After a few minutes, they calmed down and went back inside to reapply makeup. Rinse and repeat.
Jongdal is the town. Chodo means “Elementary.” Hakyeo means “school.”
Every weekday between 11:45 and 12:10 I step off the outskirts bus, the one that circles the entire island. I say “Komapsimnida” to the driver, walk past this blue arrow, and eat lunch with the teachers and children of Jongdal.
My rowdy 2nd grade boys. Good kids.
The sounds of the lunchroom The sounds of the cafeteria and of Ho Sang, who found the recorder.
The school is small, and lunch is good. Home-made, it is rice or noodles, soup, a main dish, and kimchi. Upon entering the cafeteria one is greeted by hand sanitizer and a chart outlining proper nutrition. Pizza and hamburgers are drawn and crossed out, an unhappy cartoon chef pointing to them. Next to the serving window a whiteboard outlines the week’s menu of savory stews and sprouts with pickled radish or apples with red pepper. There are no forks or knives, only spoons and chopsticks with which to take your chicken off the bone or the spine out of your fish. Napkins are available after the meal has finished. Then comes a small cup of barley tea. The children have no problem with this system. While a pair of English teachers puzzle over unprocessed food, eight-year-olds invent faces and are gently reminded to eat. Extra dumplings go quickly, a cook walking from table to table navigating a noisy eager throng. Students show empty or mostly-empty plates for permission to leave. The kindergarten teacher spoon-feeds her last straggler until he is too full or too distracted to continue, and the cafeteria is empty again, a fragrant wasteland of pulled-out chairs and metal trays.
After crossing the space between the cafeteria and the school’s main building, sixth-grade boys sit on the ledge that follows the stairs back inside. Everyone grabs a toothbrush and toothpaste, brushing diligently in a loose huddle over the large stainless steel sinks that sit in the one hallway. Then each class sweeps, mops, and dusts its room. The pretty part-time librarian goes home to Jejusi, and I prepare the English classroom for the first of three lessons.
I plan my classes, each level with its own curriculum. All students have one day of vocabulary, one of spelling, and one of speaking. The fourth varies, and the fifth is free, usually reserved for outside games. Tee-ball is popular among the third and fourth graders, who play by a unique set of Korean children’s rules still incomprehensible to me. They are fluid and often change based upon the number of available players or relative skill level. The school building is an L shape with the playground and multipurpose field filling out a rectangle, all surrounded by short walls of layered volcanic rock. Along the field side of this wall is a street, busy by local standards, where the outskirts bus going either way quickly stops, squealing, and then lurches once more into motion every twenty minutes. When given the chance to “study” outside, the youngest prefer to wander around intermittently climbing the playground equipment, picking up a soccer game, or sitting on the shoulders of their English teacher. Two rides are a must, but one or both may be substituted for being held by the elbows and spun parallel to the ground. This substitution causes no small amount of dizziness, especially for the engine responsible. Crying, though unavoidable, always passes quickly. It may be caused by a hand stepped upon, a social slight, or merely a need for momentary attention. The large multicolored plastic rabbit head adorning the jungle gym smiles buck-toothedly over whatever scene presents itself to his painted-on eyes.
Twelve teachers and five staff run this school. In the morning they park their cars and walk past the sixty-one-key pump organ with a single stuck note, E flat. Just inside the door they trade their dress shoes for slippers and begin work. At the end of the day the Principal, Vice Principal, and Curriculum Coordinator travel together. They are the three oldest men at the school. Even when only he and a driver are present, the Principal rides in the backseat.
I know Kyu He the best. She has a pale round face which I imagine as someone’s sister in a Chinese classical painting,. Her black hair was just tinged saffron at a salon in Jejusi. Korean people have straight jet black hair. Not black hair like wet dark brown, but black like someone whose great great Cherokee grandmother has held on through the genetic storm of generational crosses. I’m still here, white man. Black like a leather jacket. Completely black. Kyu He teaches fourth grade. She is from Jejudo. So are her parents.
She grew up in Hamdeok, climbing as a child the oreum that separates our beach from Bukchon, the next town over. The same paths that I find fresh for exploration as an adult are to her a place where only childhood lives. Because she is unmarried, Kyu He still lives at home. This is her first job after college.
The class sings Singing in class. You hear Eun Jin the best. In this and other venues she has one volume.
The harmonica my sister plays is made of corn.
There are two rows of corn left. My sister is playing the corn harmonica.
The principal, though long a teacher, has just been promoted. His predecessor was a relaxed man with grandchildren whom I met in the Hotel Robero in Jejusi. I wore a tie and displayed my best manners. He spoke no English, his polo shirt completely unbuttoned, and told me through an interpreter we would probably never meet again. He changed schools a few days later, preferring a bigger budget and students more willing to learn. Jongdal students are country kids. They are too fiery for this hamlet, which is inhabited mostly by them, their cousins, and grandparents. There isn’t even a grocery store. The old principal told everyone that I was handsome and gentle, a fact Kyu He relayed as she drove me to the first day of school. But I digress.
Once more it has been quite some time since my last post, but with reason. Not long after the hospitalization, civil trials, rock shows, and cross-country journeys, I became a statistic of the economic downturn. I was laid off, and fewer things more fortunate have occurred in my young life.
Mandrew Rufous T. Hummingbird in an Ethereal Pose (at St. Columba, Eden of Bartlett)
Luck has been with me. After working and living once more in the Eden of Bartlett, this time as a cook, I found myself suddenly moving to South Korea. I have started a new life on Jeju-do, Korea’s honeymoon capital. I live next to the beach. I teach English to Elementary School children for three hours a day. I have great friends.
I got a second chance.
Ethnomusicology will remain a primary focus for my writing. However, this blog, once the outlet of a cubicle monkey, will now serve a much different purpose. It will chronicle this, my fantastic voyage, the beginning of my second life.
